EPILOGUE: MY CRITICS AND I [A] violent outcry has
been made against the book, exactly answering the
expectation I always had of the justice, the wisdom,
the charity, and fair dealing of those whose good will
I despaired of. It has been presented by the Grand
Jury and condemned by thousands who never saw a word of
it. It has been preached against before my Lord Mayor;
and an utter refutation of it is daily expected from a
reverend divine, who has called me names in the
advertisements and threatened to answer me in two
months time for above five months together. ...[He]
shows a fine talent for invectives and great sagacity
in discovering atheism...(Mandeville, Fable of the
Bees, 1705/1962, p. 25
It seemed like a useful and entertaining idea when Jack
Repcheck, then editor at Princeton University Press, suggested
that a reply to critics of the first edition be included in this
second edition. It would be an opportunity to discuss the
validity of criticisms of central issues, and thereby either
strengthen the book's arguments or tell which arguments were
validly criticized and hence abandoned in this edition.
When I came to write this, however, I saw that the situation
was not what we had envisioned. Despite the gratifyingly large
amount of attention the book received, there has been little
serious criticism by economists. A large proportion of the
attacks have come from biologists, who for many decades and
centuries - back to Benjamin Franklin, as discussed on page 000 -
have voiced the strongest fears of population growth.) And much
of what they write is outside the framework of economics (though
the subject of the book is the economics of population), and even
outside of ordinary scientific discourse, as will be seen below.
I'll first address the substantive issues, then discuss the
personal attacks. Lastly, I'll offer some observations on the
nature of the criticism, and on its effects.
One reason for the paucity of serious criticism of the
book's theory and factual base is that much of the book's core
argument is not at all novel or radical, though it seems so to
non-economists. Indeed, much of what is written here had been
settled wisdom before I came along.
Food. The benign trends in food production and consumption
have been known to respected agricultural economists - M. K.
Bennett and Theodore Schultz perhaps preeminent among the
consensus - since the 1950s or the 1960s. From them I learned
the central ideas conveyed about agriculture here. Even those who
were dubious about agriculture a decade or two ago have now come
around to this consensus, perhaps mainly because of the continued
accumulation of data which have ever more sharply contradicted
the doomsayers. For example, we now read in the newspaper:
The World Bank...on the eve of a two-day conference
on 'Overcoming Global Hunger'...sought to refute the
Malthusian thesis that the world will reach a point
where it cannot produce enough food for an expanding
population, In fact, said bank Vice president Ismail
S[e]rageldin, agricultural prices are 'at their lowest
levels in history' and world food production 'rises
faster than the population'.
For anyone who has followed the World Bank's utterances since the
1970s, this public statement represents an amazing turnaround.
Evidence of this consensus about the trends can be found
even in the most unlikely of places. Lester Brown and his
Worldwatch Institute - Brown having been one of the harsh critics
of this book - continue to warn of impending food shortages, just
as Brown has for decades (see Chapters 5-7 and my 1990 book). In
1994 they warn that (according to the newspaper) "After 40 years
of record food production gains, output per person has reversed
with 'unanticipated abruptness.'" In other words, they
implicitly confess that all the earlier dire warnings by Brown
were wrong and the food situation has improved, rather than
deteriorated as he had forecast it would- a confirmation of what
the consensus of agricultural economists has said for decades.
Yet as always in the past, Brown once more reads into an
inevitable current irregularity in the trend a change in the
long-term pattern. And the press gives it huge play without even
consulting the mainstream agricultural economists. Natural
Resources. Similarly, under the influence of Harold Barnett and
Chandler Morse's 1967 Scarcity and Growth (the great book which
was my tutor), many resource economists had long ago moved far
toward the position on which this book stands with regard to
natural resources. True, I push these ideas further than most,
but this is not a theoretical difference; the main novelty here
on resource topics is the broad data that I provide, together
with the explicit assertions about non-finiteness which might
even be considered implicit in some predecessors' writings.
Pollution. Early in this century A. C. Pigou provided the
basic economic theory of environmental pollution that is the
backbone of my chapters on that topic. Nothing radical in this
book for economists to criticize.
Population Growth. With respect to the effects of
population growth itself, the economics profession as a whole did
not endorse it as I did in the first edition or in my earlier
professional work. But for centuries there have been important
voices arguing in favor of population growth, including William
Pett, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Malthus himself reversed his
position in the second edition of his Essay. Even economists not
persuaded of population growth's advantages have never worried
greatly about its consequences because of the economist's
emphasis on the remarkable properties of spontaneous economic
adjustment to change. So it was not very surprising when during
the 1980s there was a shift among professional economists who
study the economics of population effects to the position where
they now stand, as encapsulated in the 1986 NAS report which is
not far from the position of this book, though that fact is not
reflected in the popular press. (The few economists who call
their work "ecological economics" and take a strong negative
position on growth are far from the mainstream of economics.)
Before proceeding to discuss substantive criticisms and
negative rhetoric, it should be noted that a fair amount of the
huge attention the book received - the reviews in journals,
magazines, and newspapers that found their way to me came to an
amazing 150, with many more since then in books and in personal
correspondence - has been positive. I am grateful for the helpful
ideas and positive words. No more will be said about the
positive comments here, with the sole exception of two letters
from Friedrich Hayek appended to this chapter.
SUBSTANTIVE ISSUES Martha Campbell, a political scientist and
founder of two population "activist" organizations, collected and
published the major substantive criticisms of my work on
population. Her aim was to provide a compendium of refutations
of my work. To her credit, Campbell stuck to discussable issues
and left aside the sorts of non-substantive ad hominem attacks to
be discussed later. The compendium appeared in Focus (Vol 3, No.
1, 1993), a publication of Carrying Capacity Network, an
organization dedicated to reducing the rate of population growth.
I'll address all the main issues in Campbell's review so
that the reader can be sure that I'm not ducking fundamental
criticisms. (It is a shame that I have to resort to devices like
this to assure the reader that I'm being honest, but as you will
see below, my integrity is regularly called into question by
those who dislike the ideas contained here.) I shall take up
issues largely in the order in which Campbell gives them; a few
that either seem to be confused or trivial will not be mentioned.
I will start at her beginning and march down through her list;
luckily, Campbell put the most important issues first. This
sequential procedure should also work to reassure the reader that
I am not avoiding the hard issues and selecting the creampuffs to
reply to. Furthermore, the fact that I address myself mostly to
the critics she marshals should add confidence that I am not
hunting-and-picking through the literature for the arguments I
can most easily deal with. (This sounds defensive, of course;
later you'll see why.)
It is worth noting again that though the main issues the
book addresses are economic, only a small proportion of
Campbell's criticisms are by academic economists; most are by
sociologists and organizational advocates.
1. Finiteness. The first issue listed is finiteness;
indeed, the central focus of substantive criticism is the concept
of finiteness. My general reply is presented in the context of
the argument itself in Chapters 3 and 4. In Campbell's list the
issue is mentioned first (raised by Herman Daly and John Cobb) in
connection with my merely linguistic illustration of the concept
of finiteness in mathematics where it is defined as countability,
using the example of a geometric line. I discuss this metaphor
and the criticism of it in Chapter 3. (I probably should have
foregone this excursion into pure logic and avoided misleading
some readers).
Lindsey Grant then attacks what he calls
"a faith in infinite substitutability that Simon
probably acquired from the academic economists. The
assumption is not based on any systematic rationale,
nor is it buttressed by any evidence...Biologists and
ecologists have been trying without success to persuade
the economists that the assumption is terribly
dangerous in a finite world..."
I do not say that "infinite substitutability" is possible
now or at any future moment. What I do say is that
substitutability is increasing with the passage of time; there
have been more and cheaper substitutes for each raw material with
the passage of time.
Finiteness by itself is not testable, except insofar as the
fact that no one is able to state the absolute size of the
relevant system (our cosmos) demonstrates the absence of
finiteness in its dictionary sense. But the relevant evidence we
have available - decreasing prices and increasing
substitutability - is not what one would expect from a finite
system. (Hence the critics are reduced to saying that all the
evidence of history is merely "temporary" and must reverse
"sometime", which is the sort of statement that is outside the
canon of ordinary science.)
There is no doubt that my assertion of non-finiteness is
anti-commonsensical and, indeed, mindboggling; regrettably (and
contrary to what Grant and others assert) it is not explicit in
standard economics, though it is not incompatible with standard
received economics. But the critics simply do not come to grips
with the matter that the available data are not consistent with
the assumption of finiteness.
In the same section Keyfitz disagrees with other critics and
agrees with me that "there seem to be adequate amounts of the
nonrenewable resources" (though I would not put it that way). He
then argues that the real problem is overuse of renewable
resources. But presumably this could only be so if the supply of
renewable resources is limited by some non-expandable (finite)
resources. If so, it is simply another form of the above
discussion of finite resources.
Preston has written that there is no benefit in having
additional people in the present period because the only question
is whether a given increment of people will live now or some time
in the future. "It is surely possible that by having more
[people] now we are reducing the numbers who may be alive at
future dates - for example, if we have increased the risks of
social or environmental disaster" [1982, p. 177]. A reasonable
interpretation of this is that more people contending for
resources in a given period can have bad effects, and that more
use in one period means less to be used in later periods. But
once again this depends on the assumption of a fixed (finite)
quantity of resources, the "common sense" assumption which I hope
I have dispatched (or at least called into question) in Chapters
3 and 4. This criticism also implicitly assumes that the present
value of the contribution of a given person to the creation of
knowledge is the same whether the person lives in one period or
another, a complex idea which would need some arguing to make
plausible.
Nothing I have written is intended to suggest that during
any particular period there may not be too much use of any
resource, renewable or non-renewable; indeed, I expect temporary
overuses (for example, overuse of forest resources in various
countries in various centuries) just as I expect boom-and-bust
cycles in all other human endeavors. But this is a matter of
management and adjustment in dealing with, and riding out, the
ups and downs, rather than a matter of ultimate finiteness.
2. Knowledge and Population. The second issue in
Campbell's list is the endogeneity of growth with respect to
human numbers. The first-mentioned critic (H. W. Arndt) says:
"The notion that technological progress is a function of
population because the larger the population the larger the
number of inventive minds strains credulity". In my view, the
notion that increase in knowledge is not a function of the number
of people seems to strain credulity; after all, where does
knowledge come from except from human minds? But credulity is
not the test; the conclusion should depend not on what one or
another person finds credible, but rather evidence should be the
test.
Neither Arndt nor anyone else brings evidence to bear
against the proposition, while in this book and my other books
(see especially Simon, 1992), much evidence is presented in the
book in support of the proposition that there is a strong
connection between population and production of knowledge,
holding income level constant.
Here is one more piece of data which I came across after
completing the book: According to Derek de Sola Price, each
working scientist produces about three technical papers in a
lifetime, a number which has remained rather constant over the
years.[ Price also presents many time-series which show that
there has been a huge rise in the amount of new knowledge as
measured by the number of scientific journals, citations, and the
like, during the past four or so centuries as population has
risen. This squares with all the other evidence provided in this
book.
The critics attack these data by reducing my argument to a
vulgar form in which I do not make it - that the amount of new
technology produced should be a function of numbers without
consideration of other variables such as education. Thomas
Merrick says that "Few of the technological advances now
available to LDC's were developed by LDC's." He even suggests
that "Many modern technologies in fact exacerbate LDC problems".
And Keyfitz says "Julian Simon thinks it [technology] is driven
by population; if that were so the inhabitants of squatter
colonies in Mexico City or hungry cattle herders in the Sahel
would be very creative". This issue is dealt with in Chapter 00
wherein I discuss why China and India do not now produce as much
new technology, and are not as rich, as the Western countries.
And in the evidence pertaining to the amount of science in
various countries that Love and I developed (see page 000), we
held constant the per capita income of the various countries as a
proxy for educational level; the production of technology then is
demonstrably a function of education as well as a function of
numbers.
Campbell quotes A. Bartlett as writing that I regard "Mozart
and Einstein as mere statistical events. In this simple view, the
more births the more Mozarts" (the issue dealt with just above).
But Bartlett then continues, "This suggests that we should breed
to the maximum biological rate and we should deplore the natural
growth limitation processes whose existence he has praised".
Never have I written that we should "breed to the maximum",
nor is it implied by the previous statement by Bartlett (which
also is a vulgarized form of my argument); this is typical of
much of the criticism - implying to me a view I do not hold, and
then criticizing it as ludicrous. Furthermore, there are many
costs and benefits of there being more or fewer people other than
the production of new knowledge, important though that may be.
In the same section Campbell quotes Peter Timmer: "Wise and
sensitive policy aimed at solving the short-run problems that
Simon ignores is the pressing issue for most of mankind". I do
not at all "ignore" short-run effects. But I do insist that
long-run effects should be considered also, and the entire range
of effects over time should be brought together into a present
value calculation; it is the attending only to short-run effects
that has badly misled so many writers, because the longer-run
effects often are the opposite of the short-run effects. Indeed,
this is true of all investments; the outgo happens early while
the income only occurs later.
Sirageldin and Kantner do not seem to grasp this fundamental
aspect of the investment process. Campbell quotes them: "The
main thesis...is that a moderate rate of population growth,
although harmful in the short-run [which Timmer above says that I
"ignore"], is beneficial in the long-run...[This thesis] is
logically inconsistent. If it is true for today, it cannot be
true for tomorrow...Otherwise, the detrimental short-run effect
will persist forever..." This thesis is no more inconsistent
than is any other description of the reversing time-path of a
successful investment; the early cash flow is negative, but the
later cash flow is sufficiently positive to render the investment
profitable.
Daly and Cobb simply dismiss the question with a neat dig at
this book and this writer: "In sum, all the talk about knowledge
and the mind as an ultimate resource [the title of this book]
that will offset limits imposed by finitude, entropy, and
ecological dependence seems to us to reflect incompetent use of
the very organ alleged to have such unlimited powers" (1989, p.
199).
A recent important development in economics has been the
theory of endogenous growth. That theory is consistent with the
argument I make in this book. [
3. Population and Growth. Campbell first quotes Preston
that "Even if we accept Simon's view, it was mortality-driven
population growth, not fertility-driven growth". Either I
inadvertently slipped somewhere in my writing, or Preston slipped
in reading, because I have never held any view other than that it
was the drop in mortality in the past two centuries that caused
the huge increase in population. Hence it could not have been an
increase in fertility that caused the first-ever sustained
worldwide increase in living standards that has occurred since
perhaps 1750, as Preston suggests I assert. Indeed, another
critic - Thomas L. Wayburn - believes that he can "discredit him
[Simon] once and for all. We should be suspicious of a scholar
who publishes a paper with one serious error in it". The
supposed error? My statement - which is what Preston taxes me
for not making - that "It is this decrease in the death rate that
is the cause of there being a larger world population nowadays
than in former times".[
Attention is paid to fertility in this book simply because
fertility control rather than mortality control is the central
focus of population policies. Indeed, one of the most poignant
graphs in the first edition is the decline in funds devoted by
AID to health programs abroad relative to fertility programs.
Ansley Coale suggests (in Campbell) that my argument is
defective because "a substantial fraction (perhaps an unchanging
fraction) of people of labor force age will still depend on
agricultural activities", and he refers to Bangladesh as an
example. If indeed the agricultural-sector proportions of poor
countries were not declining, economic growth would indeed be
hampered. But by now there is solid evidence that even those
countries where the matter was long questioned by some economists
- such as India - have commenced the process that has appeared
everywhere else in the world; for much data, see Sullivan.
4. Population and Environment. Thomas Stoel is the first
mention in this section of Campbell's review: My "argument is
fundamentally defective, for increased life expectancy is mainly
a function of access to health care (as well as a reflection of
public health progress in water filtration, improved sanitation,
and better nutrition), not of pollution". But it was the decline
in pollution - greatly assisted by better sanitation - that
brought about the stunning declines in mortality. The problem is
that the word "pollution" has changed its meaning simply because
the great killing disease pollutions of the past - cholera,
typhoid fever, diphtheria, and the like - have now been conquered
in the rich countries; people now think of pollution as the
relatively minor dangers (relative to the past) of pesticides and
various carcinogens. This shift in meaning is documented in
Chapter 00. Certainly vaccination and other public-health
measures have mattered greatly, as has better nutrition (which is
hardly a matter of "public health progress", as Stoel calls it,
but rather of private progress). But the gains in life
expectancy due to conquering the great water and air pollutions
of the past are undeniable.
5. Food. "Three chapters on famine and food supply ignore
completely the issue of food self-sufficiency in he developing
countries. The fact that almost all developing countries have
become net importers of grain is not mentioned" (Sirageldin and
Kantner in Campbell). Even if the "fact" that they refer to were
true, it is not relevant to any policy decisions. The aim of
self-sufficiency is exactly the sort of fallacy that economics
has been most successful in showing to be counter-productive; it
is the opposite of the principle of comparative advantage, about
which almost all economists agree.
6. Family Planning. Campbell herself writes that "he
[Simon] does not believe that governments should support family
planning programs". I do not know how she has inquired into my
beliefs on the subject. But my public record is clear: I have
written again and again that I believe that helping a couple get
the number of children that the couple wants is one of the great
works of humanity. And to the extent that governments do just
that, I generally support their activities. It is only when they
conduct a coercive or propagandistic population-control program
under the false label of "family planning" that I do not support
the activity; it then is a limitation of peoples' liberties
rather than an extension of their capacities.
***
I am flattered by the stature of some of the people who have
denounced me at one time or another. For example, my 1980
Science article was sharply criticized by the president of the
National Academy of Science, Philip Handler, along with five
other notables-- Nobel prizewinner Norman E. Borlaug, Director,
International Wheat and Maize Improvement Center; Lincoln Gordon,
Former Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs;
Marshall Green, Former Coordinator of Population Affairs, State
Department; Edwin M. Martin, Former Assistant Secretary of State
for Economic Affairs; Russell W. Peterson, President, National
Audubon Society; they, on the letterhead of the Population Crisis
Committee, wrote a long critical letter to _S_c_i_e_n_c_e about
my work, using as ammunition statements and language that seemed
almost cadged from the _G_l_o_b_a_l_ _2_0_0_0_ _R_e_p_o_r_t_
_t_o_ _t_h_e_ _P_r_e_s_i_d_e_n_t. They said (among many other
things) that over the next twenty years, "At the present rate,
some 40 percent of the world's rain forests may disappear." For
fun, I wrote to distinguished biologist Handler asking for the
basis of the "40 percent" assertion. He replied in part:
I frankly doubt that there exists anywhere
what could fairly be considered what you refer
to as a "solid time series" on rain forests.
It was for this reason that in our letter to
SCIENCE we stated the concept of con- version
of moist tropical forest in such equivocal terms,
speaking of "some 40%" and that that portion "may" dis-
appear...
I doubt that the "some 40%" used in our letter to
SCIENCE could be defended with any appreciable precision;
there are some who feel that the current trends virtually
assure complete destruction, others who feel that the
situation is less catastrophic. What I think we were
saying is that conversion rates are rapid and that a very
substan- tial amount of the remaining most forest will be
gone in the easily foreseeable future.
A less equivocal term than Handler's "equivocal terms" is
"weasel words", meaning "not the plain complete truth". It
grieves me that people of such achievements as Handler can stray
so far from the precepts of the science they do so well to
stretch the truth this way. But somehow my work evokes such
responses in otherwise thoughtful and responsible people.
EPITHETS AND RIDICULE
The volume of substantive negative comment as discussed
above has been small compared to the volume of ad hominem attack.
(Kind friends have sent me enough examples to fill cardboard
boxes.) I shall now relate some of the grosser examples, with
several motives: 1. You may be able to infer something about
the impact of the work itself from these reactions; as an old
lawyer's saying goes: "When you have the law on your side, pound
the law. When you have the facts on your side, pound the facts.
When you have neither the law nor the facts going for you, pound
the table" - or in this case, pound me, and that's a good sign.
2. I hope it induces you to imagine what it would do to you to
have so many people respond to your work in this fashion. 3. I
can't resist teasing them with their own words. And by
publicizing their nastiness and ridicule I may make the
ridiculers seem ridiculous. I have no other way of fighting
back.
Attacks on Integrity
Other charges against me are often compounded with the
charge of dishonesty. For example, in a 1983 commencement
address at Knox College, a distinguished botanist took the time
to say about my work "His ignorance of the biological realities
would simply be laughable if it did not have such dangerous
potential consequences. It seems almost unbelievable in the face
of known facts ...," that I use an "intellectually dishonest
strategy," that it is "immoral to pretend that everything is fine
when the facts so clearly tell us otherwise," and that I do this
for "short-term political gains" (Raven. 1983, p. 7).
[[[[OUT IN ULTRES2 Another sample, from a letter to the
Washington Times by an ex-State Department official and a
principal in the firm that published The Limits to Growth: "In
seeming isolation from the real world, Simon manipulates
statistics to try to prove . . . " (Lesh, 1983). ]]]And there
is lots more of such impugning my character and motives.
Consider this letter which a colleague of mine received from
Robert May, a distinguished zoologist, **former head of the
department of zoology at Oxford, and the Chief Scientific Adviser
to the British Government:**
What Simon and Wildavsky do, in essentials, is take the
rates of certified extinctions for vertebrate animals
(which extinction rates are themselves certainly an
underestimate), since 1600, and treat these numbers as
if they applied to all one million or more known animal
species, rather than the roughly 40,000 known
vertebrate species. They then build on this initial
silliness, in a letter whose tone is ill-suited to
serious intellectual discourse.
It is very difficult for me to see how any serious and
honest person, acting in good faith, could do something
so stupid as to take documented extinction figures
which pertain essentially to vertebrates and treat them
as if they applied to all metazoans. These authors
have, I might add, also been very resistant to having
this and other factual errors pointed out to them.
Sadly, I conclude that what we are dealing with here is
not an honest pursuit of intellectual understanding,
but rather with some other agenda (or possibly with
stark stupidity, or even both).
In fact, I (with Wildavsky or alone) never have made any estimate of the overall
rate of species extinction, as may be ascertained in Chapter 31. But even if I had
done so in the fashion May described, which would indeed be foolish, would that be a
basis for inferring dishonesty? And what is my "agenda"? I represent no
organization, and I receive no money in consulting or research grants (which is true
of few competent people in the field), a matter that allows me to be a particularly
free person.
I wrote the colleague saying that I would quote May's words on the dustjacket of
this book, and I sent May a copy of the letter (to tease him, I confess). May then
threatened me with lawyers. As I wrote to him[, "There does seem to be something
funny about you wanting to sue me to prevent me from printing the ugly things you say
about me."
Thomas Wayburn speculates on the content of an "agenda" such as May alludes to.
"People who try to tell us that the earth is big enough to accommodate a much larger
population probably have their own hidden agendas. For example, they may want to
ensure a cheap, readily available labor supply for themselves or for those they serve,
or they might hope that many more dissatisfied people will give them political power
faster. Thus, they hope to make things better by making things worse...One such
critic is Julian L. Simon..."[[
\ultres\tepiladd The Special Case of Paul Ehrlich
For economy of treatment of the matter of attack rhetoric, let's focus on just
one critic, Paul Ehrlich, who has directed a great deal of colorful language in my
direction (see also his comments in the Afternote to Chapter 15, and my interchange
with him in Simon, 1990, Selection 43). He is a treasure-trove of snappy quotes (for
other of his remarks, please look him up in the index of this book) useful for writers
who are critical of me and also for me in this chapter to show how he works; for
example, he (with Anne Ehrlich) confer on me the leadership of a "space-age cargo
cult"[
One of Ehrlich's main devices is attributing some combination of stupidity and
scientific ignorance to those with whom he disagrees. In a talk to 200,000 people in
person (how many more on television I do not know) on Earth Day, 1990, Ehrlich alluded
to the title of this book, saying "The ultimate resource - the one thing we'll never
run out of is imbeciles", which got a good laugh from the crowd.[; he frequently uses
words like "ignorant", "crazy", "imbecile", and "moronic".[ In an essay entitled
"Simple Simon Environmental Analysis", which is a commentary on a preceding short
essay of mine [the Ehrlichs refer to "a few uninformed people [who] claim that
population growth is beneficial", and write, "The connections between economic growth,
population growth, and quality of life are much more subtle and complicated than Simon
imagines"[ "Getting economists to understand ecology is like trying to explain a tax
form to a cranberry. It's as if Julian Simon were saying that we have a geocentric
universe at the same time NASA's saying the earth rotates around the sun. There's no
reconciling these views. When you launch a space shuttle you don't trot out the flat-
earthers to be commentators. They're outside the bounds of what ought to be discourse
in the media. In the field of ecology, Simon is the absolute equivalent of the flat-
earthers". (Minor comment: I'm not "in the field of ecology").[
Then others copy Ehrlich's colorful language. The former Medical Director of
International Planned Parenthood Foundation, Malcolm Potts, writes, "Julian Simon -
and his fellow flat-earthists - assured Washington decision makers that entrepreneurs
and Nobel prize winners would be popping up from the streets of Calcutta propelled by
the glorious multiplication of human numbers" [
Ehrlich taxes me as follows: "Misdefining the problem, selective use of data,
analyses of time series over inappropriate intervals, and determined ignorance of the
most basic tenets of science. Indeed, the book contains so many childish errors that
it would take work of equal length to detail them." (Paul Ehrlich, with Anne
Ehrlich.)1
Ehrlich frequently recycles the same remarks: "To explain to one of them the
inevitability of no growth in the material sector, or...that commodities must become
expensive would be like trying to explain odd-day-even-day gas distribution to a
cranberry" [ And "The views of...Simon are taken seriously by a segment of the
public, even though to a scientist they are in the same class as the idea that Jack
Frost is responsible for ice-crystal patterns on a cold window" "Simon apparently
doesn't know the difference between an old-growth virgin forest (with its critical
biodiversity intact) and a tree farm." And when asked "his opinion of Simon, he said,
'that's like asking a nuclear physicist about horoscopes.'" [
Ehrlich and I have never debated face to face. He says that he has refused
because I am a "fringe character".[ We have only locked horns directly in two cases,
and in both incidents he has been demonstrably wrong. He and his colleagues based
their criticism of my 1980 Science article (that conveyed some of the findings of this
book) on what turned out to be a typographical error in a source. If I had been in
their shoes, I would have been chagrined and embarrassed when this was discovered.
But Ehrlich replied: "What scientist would phone the author of a standard source [as I
did] to make sure there were not typos in a series of numbers showing a general trend
with which every analyst in the field is completely familiar?" (That must be one of
the most peculiar lines ever written by a member of a profession whose business is the
search for scientific truth.) I consider it very significant that Ehrlich has
suffered no apparent damage from being so wrong; I know of no mention of the incident
in print.
Our other encounter was the bet mentioned on page 000, following on the 1980-
1981 interchange in Social Science Quarterly (reproduced in my 1990 book). Many
people have asked him about its outcome, and a few of the answers have been passed on
to me. To a college newspaper: "The bet doesn't mean anything". On BBC television:
"It was an excellent bet. We happened to lose it. You can lose making an excellent
bet". (Indeed that is quite correct. But one should then be anxious to repeat the bet
- which Ehrlich refuses to do.) But on the same program he said, "I debated a long
time about whether to take him up on the bet because it was the wrong bet [but compare
his remark cited on page 000 about how anxious he and his colleagues were to make the
bet, and to make it much larger]. On the other hand, it was very hard to explain the
right bet to him and finally we decided that if we took the bet we'd shut him up for
at least ten years". To a book interviewer: "We knew if we bet on metals there would
be a fair chance we'd lose. But we knew at the very least that if we took him on we
could keep him quiet for a decade. But the bet was trivial; we could have bet on the
state of the atmosphere or on biodiversity loss..." And "The bet doesn't mean
anything. Julian Simon is like the guy who jumps off the Empire State Building and
says how great things are going so far as he passes the 10th floor. I still think the
price of those metals will go up eventually...I have no doubt that sometime in the
next century food will be scarce enough that prices are really going to be high even
in the United States". But to repeat, of course Ehrlich will not bet again.
Ehrlich (with Stephen Schneider, 1995) has also written that he "once made the
mistake of being goaded into making a bet with Simon on a matter of marginal
environmental importance (prices of metals). And he told reporter that "I got
schnookered...Prices of metals really don't have much to do with environmental
quality". But in 1980 Ehrlich and his colleagues said they would "accept Simon's
astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in." Goaded? And concerning
"marginal importance" and "schnookered", check his voluminous writings about the
importance of predicted scarcities he predicted for food and other natural resources -
scarcities which are best measured by prices, of course. (San Francisco Chronicle
opinion column of May 18, 1995)
Others have attempted to explain the bet away, too. Norman Myers writes: "The
Ehrlich group lost the bet, but through unusual circumstances of the 1980s that
prompted Simon himself to write...`I have been lucky that this particular period
coincided so nicely with my argument'"[ Myers's statement is false; I was not
"prompted" by "unusual circumstances" to say "I have been lucky". Rather, there
always is a certain amount of uncertainty in any wager, and the soundest wager can be
lost if one has bad luck; that is all that I meant. In fact, I consider the
circumstances in the 1980s not the slightest bit unusual.
(If Mr. Myers himself believes that the circumstances were unusual, why will he
not take me up on my offer to repeat the wager - for any period he picks, for any
commodities? During a debate with him I repeatedly challenged him to wager on this or
any other trend of material welfare. But he merely ignored my offer, just as Ehrlich
and others have ignored the offer of another go-round - in the same breath as they try
to explain away losing the first time.)
An entire article was devoted to "How Julian Simon Could Win the Bet and Still
Be Wrong". The argument is: "Most economists would have bet on Simon from the
start...but many of them also know that Ehrlich is right. Quality of life did
deteriorate worldwide in the ten year interval."[ (Nobody said that the bet was an
index of "quality of life". But in any case, quality of life has not deteriorated, as
this book shows aplenty.)
One of Ehrlich's devices is to refer to "Julian Simon, a specialist in mail-
order marketing", a device copied with variation by Garrett Hardin as in "marketing
expert Julian Simon". I plied that trade for two years ending in 1963 (plus writing a
book on the subject that still sells well in the 5th edition, I'm proud to say.
Unfortunately, there are many to whom the idea of private business is incompatible
with truth or honor or public service, and Ehrlich clearly is playing to them. He
probably also is suggesting that a former businessperson must not be a sound scholar.
Sometimes Ehrlich combines this device with not mentioning my name, as in "an
economist specializing in mail-order marketing".[Here he actually writes a falsehood
about my specialty at present (and the past 30 years), which he does again in another
variation, referring to me without name on television as "a Professor of Mail-Order
Marketing"; a more litigious person might sue him.
POLITICIZED CRITICISM
One of the difficulties in having a reasoned discussion with my critics is that
many frame their criticisms in political terms.
Attacks from the Far Right and Far Left
Politically-tinged attacks come from both sides of the political spectrum. From
what I can tell, the politics of some of these people is at the far left and some at
the far right. They attack me as being (presumably) the opposite of what they
themselves are.
I have been attacked by people who call themselves "conservatives" as a Marxist
and a Red (especially with respect to immigration), and by still others as a
libertarian. An article entitled "Simon Says: Take One Giant Step to Unreality",
begins: "The most important thing to know about Julian Simon is that he is motivated
by ideology. As a libertarian, his focus is the individual; but not all individuals,
just those deemed oppressed by 'society'...Knowing where Simon is coming from helps
when trying to make sense of his arguments. The hodge-podge of 'evidence', the bold
but unsupported assertions and his constant mixing of apples and oranges stem from the
fact that his research is not aimed at seeking the truth...His research is for
propaganda purposes"[
Perhaps because those of far-right persuasion are relatively rare in academia,
attacks on me as a "lousy Red" tend to come on scrawled postcards without signature.
One such flattered me with a death threat which a neighbor in the Secret Service
thought worth having the FBI track down.
Those on the left dismiss me as motivated by religious or other traditional
ideas. Many tar me with the brush of putative association with political conservatism
(though I do not subscribe to that doctrine any more than I am a "liberal"). For
example, the distinguished demographer Nathan Keyfitz makes it seem that I am of their
party when he writes that "The applause that Simon gets from the political right on
his other views is more muted on immigration", though he is indeed correct that the
right criticizes me on immigration[. And a review of my 1986 book in the main
sociological review medium, Contemporary Sociology begins:
Never has a conservative neoclassical economist attempted so
rigorous a defense of the weakest points of Marxist population
theory.
It was a joy to reply to that, beginning as follows:
I am anxious to set the record straight on this
sentence, lest my family think I've gone round the
bound with respect to "conservative", some colleagues
take comfort that I have turned "neoclassical", and
friends take fright about the Marxism.
The reviewer, Douglas Anderton, responded:
My characterization of Simon's central arguments as
conservative, neoclassical, and consistent with Marxist
population theory are all accurate. Simon responds
that he does not consider himself personally
conservative...
It is easy to make fun of the inaccuracy and illogic of Anderton's reply. For
example, the review referred to me as "conservative", but when that becomes patently
untenable - it would be nigh impossible to say with a straight face that a person is
conservative when a person refuses such a label - the response shifts to my argument
as being conservative. And, my argument goes from being a "point of Marxist
population theory" to being "consistent with" Marxist thought after I note that it
originated with the founding father of classical economic thought two hundred years
before Marx. But the key point here is not how far the reviewer reaches to be
critical; rather, the key point is the extent to which the reviewer's politics, and
his beliefs about what mine are, suffuse his review.
As to the substance of the review, it boils down to this last sentence in the
response: "I am simply suggesting that, in this text, Simon has ignored the basic
physical realities of entropy". In other words, a sociologist instructs us that the
physics of cosmology - a subject now enlivened by fundamental speculative differences
(see Chapter 00) - as embodied in that old chestnut entropy, makes nonsense of what I
write about population economics. Once again, it all comes back to the assertion that
our cosmos and our planetary resources are "finite".
Political attacks of this stripe are reminiscent of the switch in the language
applied to Soviet leaders antedating the collapse of the USSR. Before sympathizers
found out how murderously cruel the socialist Stalinist-Marxist regime was, and still
looked on it with favor, people who referred to themselves with such labels also
referred to the USSR as "left-wing" and "progressive" and "liberal". After even the
most sympathetic apologist could no longer deny the truth of the brutality, the former
apologists began to refer to the Stalinist types still in power as "conservative" and
"right-wing", and the anti-socialist free-market Russians as "liberal". In other
words, "right wing" and "conservative" often are simply pejorative rather than
referring to a particular sort of political or economic thought.
Many of the critics from both ends of the political spectrum seem to have in
common that they believe in "rational" governmental control of individuals and
society. Chinese tracts on population write that just as the production of goods
"must" be planned, the production of human capital also must be planned. The zealous
right-wing and the zealous left-wing both want the state - and of course, themselves
as leaders of the state - to tell people what to do. The wings differ somewhat in
what they want to control - whether people's personal or business lives, though they
may agree in such matters as wanting authorities to regulate how a person maintains
the lawn in front of the house. (I just read of a couple being hailed into court in
South Salt Lake City for "failing to maintain their landscape" due to insufficient
watering.) It is with respect to governmental control of the acts of individuals that
my values diverge most sharply from those of both political wings who criticize this
book on political grounds.
This book argues that the reasons both those on the Far Left and Far Right give
for wanting to control individuals' demographic behavior are not valid economically.
Many on the Far Right want to reduce immigration, and they offer supposed economic
reasons for doing so; they attack me because my work suggests that their reasons are
not sound. Some among the Far Right, and perhaps among the Far Left, too, also want
other nations to actively control population growth because they wish to prevent an
increase in the numbers of people in non-European countries, either for fear of
becoming numerically inferior for military reasons (a view which the U. S. Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) has advanced for decades; see U. S. National Security
Council, 1974) or because of the desire that the proportion of white people will not
decline more rapidly than is happening.
RESPONSE TO THE PERSONAL ATTACKS
One cannot argue with personal attacks. One can, however, attempt to explain
them. Concerning the purpose of the attacks, I see them as a device for
marginalizing, devilizing, and thereby dismissing from consideration people like me so
that their ideas should not be taken seriously. As to explaining why such passions
are aroused, one can learn from the history of the theory of relativity. (More
generally, see Chapter 00 on the nature of the thinking and the central concepts at
work in these discussions - the central cause of the difference in conclusions.)
Bertrand Russell said that "The theory of relativity depends, to a considerable
extent, upon getting rid of notions which are useful in ordinary life". And in the
Middle Ages, accepting the idea that Earth should be considered round for astronomical
purposes required that people get past the everyday idea that the surface of a pond is
flat, and that a ball does not roll on a table. Similarly, understanding the
economics of natural resources such as energy requires leaving aside the everyday idea
that there must be a "finite" quantity of them, and therefore that using some must
mean there is less left, hence increased scarcity. Just as Russell tells us that with
Einstein's work "the old ideas of space and time had to be changed fundamentally", the
everyday concept of the stock of a resource as measured by physical quantity must give
way to the economic concept of the stock of a resource as measured by its price. The
doomsayers jeer at this anti-commonsensical idea just as Copernicus' and Galileo's
opponents jeered at their conception of the cosmos (which makes it rather ironic,
incidentally, that Ehrlich et. al. choose the epithet "flat-earther" to throw at me).
(Relax, I'm not comparing myself to those greats. I'm just suggesting that we can
learn from their experiences.)
Famous science writer Isaac Asimov expressed the bewilderment of a person who at
least faced up to this intellectual predicament, as Ehrlich et. al. do not. Asimov
read about the resources bet and then wrote:
Naturally, I was all on the side of the pessimist and
judge my surprise when it turned out he had lost the
bet; that the prices of the metals had indeed fallen;
that grain was cheaper; that oil...was cheaper; and so
on.
I was thunderstruck. Was it possible, I thought,
that something that seemed so obvious to me - that a
steadily rising population is deadly - can be wrong?
Yes, it could be. I am frequently wrong.
Asimov permitted himself to be bewildered. "I don't understand this," he wrote.
And he says about economics in general: "I cannot understand it, and I cannot believe
that anyone else understands it, either. People may say they understand it...but I
think it is all a fake."
Unlike Asimov, the doomsayers refuse to allow themselves to be bewildered by the
facts. Instead, they simply reject the facts and deride anyone who presents the
facts. Garrett Hardin writes:
To really get to the heart of the matter [population
growth], we must ignore statistical arguments and opt
for the commonsense approach.
As the logician...Quine has said, 'Science itself is a
continuation of common sense. Therefore, this essay
will avoid statistics. The opaqueness of statistical
arguments makes it easy for analysts to "get away with
murder". Though often wonderfully useful, statistics
can also serve as a substitute for thought...empirical
studies ...can be so selected and arranged as to seem
to support faith in perpetual growth, the religion of
the most powerful actors in a commercial society...
...On the one hand, a legion of economists say, "Why worry? An
increase in people doesn't matter...On the other hand, a brigade
of environmentalists assert that shortages are real and
ultimately decisive".
In a debate with Dennis Meadows, every time someone asked him how he squared his
Malthusian theory with the data I showed, he answered: "Simon looks at the past; I
look at the future". Scientific data, of course, necessarily refer to past.
In an article on the bet, columnist Jessica Mathews said that my views on
"finiteness" are "palpable nonsense." The word "palpable" means felt. No doubt
Mathews feels that what I have to say is nonsense; it is indeed not common sense. But
feeling is not a scientific argument. And assertions and policy conclusions drawn
from feeling - as is often the case in these matters - are likely to mislead us when
they run counter to the scientific evidence.
(Typically, Mathews attempts to marginalize me by referring to my ideas as
"extreme". She notes that Ehrlich lost the bet, I won, and then she asserts that the
truth apparently is somewhere in between these extremes. Because she derided the bet
as being on the wrong matters, I wrote to her: "Would you like to bet on any of these
matters? If you can propose a measure or measures for worldwide pollution...I would
probably be happy to wager on that one, also." But she prudently did not respond.)
Why the Vehemence?
From a letter from Margaret Maxey:
25 February 1994
I had the dubious fortune this past May to be an
invited panelist in Montreal at an international
conference on energy. One of the panelists was with
the World Bank. In response to a vitriolic comment
from the floor about The Ultimate Resource, which I had
praised in my portion of the panel, the nameless [World
Bank representative] opined that "Julian Simon is a
criminal!"
Perhaps a third of the 1982 presidential address to the Population Association of
America was devoted to attack on my work as an "insult" to the demographic profession.
That dignitary (in a later book review) called my 1981 book "filled with incomplete
analysis, selective documentation, and false analogies," referred to the "absurdity of
Simon's main arguments", and summarized by saying that "It is dismaying and more than
a little discouraging after more than three decades of concerted effort to bring sense
into the analysis of this vital area of human affairs, that a book so lacking in
serious merit should receive such widespread attention...This is not an area for
frivolous approaches or one where academics may contend confusedly with no great harm
to anyone. It is an area where an effective mobilization of public will and
commitment based on understanding of issues is essential."
A World Wildlife Fund official was quoted in the Cox newspapers as saying about
me, "The man's a terrorist." And here is Garrett Hardin's innimitable language:
Simon's conclusions are highly palatable to budget
evaders, car salesmen, realtors, advertisers, land
speculators, and optimists in general; scientists find
them appalling ... like the fast change artist at a
county fair, befuddles the reader with rapid rhetorical
interchanges ... sleight of hand ..."
When in a taped interchange I asked Hardin why he spoke with
such vehemence and used so many ad hominems, he replied that my
Science article "raised the blood pressure of the scientific
community a good twenty points".[
A colleague gave a talk about population, resources, and
environment to "grassroots lobbyists for U. S. aid programs". He
"commented to the chairman...just before we went to the podium.'
Really you should have had Julian Simon here, not me' His
response was electric: 'Oh no, not him. We could not afford the
cost of all the bodyguards we'd need to keep them (the audience)
from tearing him apart'".
After Garrett Hardin and I debated at the University of
Wisconsin in 1989, sociologist William Freudenburg wrote
...to express both admiration and apologies...[because
he was] appalled at the "hospitality" that all of us,
collectively, offered to you and to your ideas.
The admiration...partly for the equanimity with which
you responded to behaviors that I found to be downright
childish...I find it quite ironic that the people who
think of themselves as "real" scientists were the ones
coming up with excuses for not dealing with data,
resorting to ad hominem attacks, and generally showing
a disdain for scientific methods that I formerly
thought would be found only among book-burners...
THE EFFECTS OF THE "CRITICISM"
The attacks have hampered the dissemination of these ideas, just as intended by
the attackers; I regret giving them this satisfaction, but so it is. There were many
complaints that Science published my first "public" article on the subject. Ehrlich
said, "Could the editors have found someone to review Simon's manuscript who had to
take off his shoes to count to 20"? This is part of his judgment that views like
mine, like those of "flat-earthers", should not be published because they are not
within the accepted mainstream view. "The notion that the world is flat is not in the
spectrum of ideas that must be included in the news for balance. Few reporters or
editors, however, have had the basic education that would provide a similar filtering
capacity for statements on environmental issues".[ Indeed, the then-editor of Science
said he "want[ed] to censor the paper a bit"[ And his successor editor at that most
important scientific journal in the world withdrew an invitation to me to write an
article therein after I told him of the prior incident, which he was not aware of.
(The day of the invitation he told me he prided himself on publishing controversial
material; the next day, when withdrawing the invitation, he praised my "integrity" in
informing him of the previous incident.
Or consider that the most prestigious population research group in the world --
Princeton's Office of Population Research, whose long-time director was a tennis
partner of the president of the university -- complained to that president that the
Princeton University Press should not publish my books. The incident is captured on
paper in correspondence between my editor at the Press and the Princeton president.
In an article about the incident as part of being an editor, Sanford Thatcher wrote
that as a result of the books' "direct challenge to some of the academic scholarship
emanating from Princeton's own Office of Population Research... various of [its]
faculty made their displeasure known to the University's administration after the book
was published".
Then there is the correspondence between the Mellon Foundation and the august
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), also on paper. A
committee of the AAAS sought funds to study the relationship of population, resources,
and the environment. Among other potential funding sources, the committee turned to
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and received a feasibility grant. This is an excerpt
from a letter to AAAS discussing further funding, signed by J. Kellum Smith, Jr., Vice
President and Secretary of that foundation:
Because the links among population, resources, and
environment are so obvious and strong...I hope the
suggestion of an alternative title [to the original
one] does not indicate diffidence, in your group, on
the matter of facing up to the malign consequences of
rapid population increase. Should such diffidence
exist, I would suppose that it might cripple the
program and that therefore the exercise might as well
be halted forthwith...
I am disconerted by the suggestion that there is a
problem in handling "the widely divergent views of the
Cornucopians and Malthusians". If by "the
Cornucopians" is meant Julian Simon and his few allies,
I should think a footnote would be sufficient to
dispose of them...
If there is nervousness on the point, it had better be faced
up to forthwith. The issue of population increase is central to
the proposed program...[
For information about such curious episodes as a campaign to
have me fired from the University of Illinois for having written
this book, see my 1990 book, Part 8.
I'll spare you more examples.
Lest the reader be amazed at the human propensity to
suppress opposing views, consider the case of as great a
philosopher who has lived, David Hume. His History of the
Stewarts "was...unquestionably much the most important work that
had recently come from any Scotch pen, yet in a periodical
instituted for the very purpose of devoting attention to the
productions of Scotch authors [The Edinburgh Review], this work
of his remained absolutely un-noticed. Why this complete boycott
of Hume by his own household? [He was good friends with the
staff.]...the ignoring of his writings [can be explained by] the
intense odium theologicum which the name of Hume excited at the
moment, and which made it imperative, if the new Review was to
get justice, that it should be severed from all association with
his detested name".[
All this ugliness ** ** has led others to steer clear of me
** ** even when they believe that the work is sound and the
conclusions correct - and even when they refer to themselves as
my friends, and say nice things in private. This has been
painful as well as damaging. But if I can feel *as if* I'm in
the same boat with as great a man as David Hume in at least this
respect, that's considerable comfort.
TWO LETTERS FROM HAYEK: EXCERPTS
Lest I leave the impression that the reaction to this book
and to the rest of my work on population has been entirely
negative, here are excerpts from letters by as great an economist
as has lived in the 20th Century, Nobel-prize winning Friedrich
Hayek.
URACHSTRASSE 27
D-7800 Freiburg (Breisgau)
March 22, 1981
Dear Professor Simon,
I have never before written a fan letter to a
professional colleague, but to discover that you have
in your Economics of Population Growth provided the
empirical evidence for what with me is the result of a
life-time of theoretical speculation, is too exciting
an experience not to share it with you. The upshot of
my theoretical work has been the conclusion that those
traditional rules of conduct (esp. of several property)
which led to the greatest increases of the numbers of
the groups practicing them leads to their displacing
the others -- not on "Darwinian" principles but because
based on the transmission of learned rules -- a concept
of evolution which is much older than Darwin. I doubt
whether welfare economics has really much helped you to
the right conclusions. I claim as little as you do
that population growth as such is good -- only that it
is the cause of the selection of the morals which guide
our individual action. It follows, of course, that our
fear of a population explosion is unjustified so long
as the local increases are the result of groups being
able to feed larger numbers, but may become a severe
embarrassment if we start subsidizing the growth of
groups unable to feed themselves.
Sincerely,
F.A.Hayek
SHIMODA TOKYU HOTEL
Shimoda, Nov. 6, 1981
Dear Professor Simon,
... I have now at last had time to read [The
Ultimate Resource] with enthusiastic agreement. So far
as practical effect is concerned it ought to be even
more important than your theoretical work which I found
so exciting because it so strongly supports all the
conclusions of the work I have been doing for the last
few years. I do not remember whether I explained in my
earlier letter that one, perhaps the chief thesis of
the book on The Fatal Conceit, the first draft of which
I got on paper during the past summer, is that the
basic morals of property and honesty, which created our
civilization and the modern numbers of mankind, was the
outcome of a process of selective evolution, in the
course of which always those practices prevailed, which
allowed the groups which adopted them to multiply more
rapidly (mostly at their periphery among people who
already profited from them without yet having fully
adopted them.) That was the reason for my enthusiasm
for your theoretical work.
Your new book I welcome chiefly for the practical
effects I am hoping from it. Though you will be at
first much abused, I believe the more intelligent will
soon recognize the soundness of your case. And the
malicious pleasure of being able to tell most of their
fellows what fools they are, should get you the support
of the more lively minds about the media. If your
publishers want to quote me they are welcome to say
that I described it as a first class book of great
importance which ought to have great influence on
policy....
With best wishes,
Sincerely,
F. A. Hayek
***
*Let's* @I'll@ end this Epilog with a quotation
from John Stuart Mill in On Liberty:
The worst offence... which can be committed by a polemic
is to stigmatise those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and
immoral men. To calumny of this sort, those who hold any
unpopular opinion are peculiarly exposed, because they are in
general few and uninfluential, and nobody but themselves feels
much interested in seeing justice done them; but this weapon is,
from the nature of the case, denied to those who attack a
prevailing opinion: they can neither use it with safety to
themselves, nor, if they could, would it do anything but recoil
on their own cause. In general, opinions contrary to those
commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation
of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary
offence, which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degreee
without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on
the side of the prevailing opinion really does deter people from
professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who
profess them.
ENDNOTES
page # ultres tepilog October 3, 1995\talks3\cromarti
and\article9\biologis